The rapid development of IoT continue to bring revolutionary changes for consumers and industry, and enhance their daily experience, especially in increasing the demand for processing power at the edge. Fitness tracker and smart speakers, agricultural and plant machinery are examples of this. It provides for a specific application memory requirements. Things embedded rich experience driving the need for more external on-board memory.
Add AI / ML in these applications to further change the memory requirements, generally require more and higher bandwidth memory. Things the application needs to physically constrained dimensions, and lower power dissipation range BOM cost, which increases the other design constraints. For these applications, the ideal candidate should be a memory problem, it has now become the primary task of many product teams, proposed and studied a new type of memory. AP-based memory PSRAM technology IoT RAM many existing MCU / SoC memory solutions have been widely used in the IoT / embedded devices / FPGA seamlessly to address the need for additional external memory, while making it easier for designers to comply with its external memory product design constraints.
Figure 1 requires more memory IoT / embedded applications
Time embedded / external SRAM and DRAM solutions already running out
SRAM is still the high-speed access memory closest to the processor, with the highest speed and lowest latency. However, SRAM has several drawbacks. Conventional 6T SRAM layout topology can not be extended to the opposite node reduction process. When As the demand for richer IoT applications and demand for more memory continues to increase, which occur simultaneously. Embedded SRAM leakage power generated with use CPU power consumption while increasing. In the case of power-optimized (for the latest IoT applications there is a higher memory requirements), which is obviously not the best choice, so SRAM will be a difficult solution.
FIG trend display unit with two shrink processing node, the scaling decreases.
External DRAM is also conceivable for networking applications, and due to its performance while still maintaining a significant cost advantage over SRAM, which consists of a single transistor and a capacitor, which can achieve a higher density of arrays. For most applications the main line into the electrical, external DRAM may be an acceptable solution. But the high pin count external DRAM, and integrate very complex. Also conventional SDRAM is in the low-density processing node older design, and due to their size, they are unsuitable for many compact energy saving system. Is there a memory alternatives can satisfy a richer experience of things growing demand while maintaining a high level of performance, lower cost and lower power consumption?